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Is English a “creole Language”?

108 points by aebtebeten 2y ago

39896880 2y ago
Creole is both a sociohistoric and linguistic term. The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! As for whether English is a Creole, it’s important to understand the motivation for Creolistics at its origin. It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages that before were considered illegitimate, un-interesting and utterly lacking on features worth studying. Part of that reputation is inextricably bound up in colonialism and racism. Could you squint and call English a Creole? Sure. But you’d be doing the same disservice to “Creole” as you would by saying “technically we’re all [in the US] African American because all humans originated in Africa.” It’s a disingenuous point, and one that could easily be mistaken for trying to reverse the legitimization efforts that brought the term into existence to begin with.
- Norah_C 2y ago
  [flagged]
- throwup238 2y ago
  > we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! What's your best attempt? :-)
  - flir 2y ago
    \s\w+\s ;)
    - eesmith 2y ago
      "Ain't ain't a word 'cause it don't match the regex." BTW, should be "\b\w+\b". The \b is a zero-width match for the start or end of a word. Your pattern requires a space before and after: >>> import re >>> re.compile(r"\b\w+\b").findall("What's the problem?") ['What', 's', 'the', 'problem'] >>> re.compile(r"\s\w+\s").findall("What's the problem?") [' the ']
      - flir 2y ago
        That makes sense. I was trying to translate "A word is a group of letters with whitespace on either side" into regex. I was being facetious, obviously, but you've already identified a serious problem with that definition (is "what's" two words or one?)
    - koito17 2y ago
      cljs.user> (re-seq #"\s\w+\s" "やり直して") nil Joking aside, is it common to use regular expressions? Seems like the method only works for languages with spaces. I think a more sophisticated lexer may be necessary, but are there are non-regex, "fast approximations" that work across most languages? This is a problem that I have not tried solving before.
      - nine_k 2y ago
        すみません! It's because you have no space around. A more correct regexp would be \b\w+\b, with zero-width "word boundary" psttetbs instead of spaces.
        Liquid_Fire 2y ago
        That's just passing the problem onto how you define \b. Since Japanese uses no spaces, it would match entire phrases or sentences as "words", treating only punctuation as word boundaries.
  - Xophmeister 2y ago
    It's a bit like the old saying, "All models are wrong, some models are useful." The concept of a "word" is useful in everyday language, particularly in English -- it's host language, unsurprisingly enough -- and (probably) other Indo-European languages. However, in a more precise context, it breaks down because of edge cases. For example, "words" in agglutinative languages[1] (e.g., Turkish) act very differently from "words" in English. It's hard (impossible?) to capture all that variety in a pithy way. "A string of morphemes" might work, but that's hardly a satisfactory definition! Maybe a good analogy for the HN crowd would be like asking, "How many characters are in a string?" [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language
    - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
      In Chinese, it's very difficult to define word boundaries. Each character is a syllable, with a particular pronunciation and a constellation of meanings, usually closely related to one another. There are very common combinations of characters that appear together, which one could define as words. However, often, you could just as easily view the individual characters as words, or the combination as a word. In some cases, the combination of two characters means something totally different from what the characters alone would mean (e.g., 东西, where the characters literally mean "East-West," but the combination means "thing"), so the combination is clearly a word. But sometimes, the meaning of the combination is basically a combination of the words' meanings (e.g., 吃饭, where the characters literally mean "eat-food," and the combination means "to eat, have a meal"). Because written Chinese doesn't use spaces, I guess it doesn't really matter what one defines as a word. The issue just doesn't come up, practically speaking.
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
        I should note that typically discussions of language are more fruitful around spoken (or signed) languages rather than writing. Writing is an artificial formal system, and as such sometimes has aspects which are much more socilogiclaly determined than spoken language, which tends to evolve more freely. Also, the problems you raise here are mostly just as applicable to English, though perhaps for somewhat fewer words. Is a "walkie-talkie" one word, or two? How about "unmarried"? The un- prefix has a distinct meaning on its own, even if it never appears alone, after all. Or how about "can't"? Technically it's a contraction of "can not", and those words do sometimes appear separately as well, even in this same meaning.
  - throw__away7391 2y ago
    It depends on the architecture of your CPU.
  - nivertech 2y ago
    There is no generally accepted definition in linguistics, but AI researchers have come to the consensus that a word is one or more LLM tokens ;) I’m not a linguist, but I would define a word as a part of a sentence composed out of one or more syllables, with word boundaries either implicitly or explicitly specified by different methods in different languages, e.g. by using pauses, longer or shorter phonemes, by using accents, rhythm, or intonation, or simply by remembering words as part of learning a lexical vocabulary. A word is something that can be categorized as to which part of speech it belongs (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.) Depending on the languages it’s not always clear whether prefixes and/or suffixes are part of the word a separate words. Similarly with compound words - do they count as a single or multiple words? A short sentence in one language may enter another language as a single opaque word.
- ycombinete 2y ago
  It's more about how people define the term. I don't think I've seen the position made disingenuously. Most people I've spoken to think of creole as a mixed language that becomes it's own language. To them that describes English and how it came to be. Even if you require colonisation to be part of it the position can stand. The Anglo-Saxon's colonisation by the Romans and the Normans are a big part of how the English mixture was formed. If your definition requires an indigenous, non-European, language being modified by contact with a European coloniser's language. Then sure, English isn't a creole language. But I don't think that's how most people use the term creole colloquially.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > The Anglo-Saxon's colonisation by the Romans That never happened; it was the other way around.
    - ithkuil 2y ago
      Germanic conquerors may be first partially reverse-colonized by the culture they conquered (which heavily romanized with Celtic substrate) and then later further colonized by norman conquerors who were themselves carriers of the remnants of the Roman cultural heritage. Germanic people (franks) conquered Gaul and you wouldn't call modern french a Germanic language. Linguistic dynamics are utterly fascinating and complex
      - ycombinete 2y ago
        I've been listening to The Rest is History podcast lately, and a lot of this happened in Islam via converts. Tom Holland was saying that many now fundamental Islamic practices were imported into the faith via converts. For example such as praying 5 times a day was apparently a Zoroastrian practice.
        ithkuil 2y ago
        The same thing happened to many Cristian practices. The Eucharist may have originated in the cult of Dionysus. Probably also Christmas is also a tradition that bears the roots of a pre-christian festivity that has been merged with / subsumed in Christian tradition
- k__ 2y ago
  Why don't just define a new word? I mean you're linguists! :D Pseudo-Creole, a language that's technically a Creole, but doesn't fit the sociohistoic context. I think, it would be funny if a word for giving specific languages legitimacy is used to define a language that had more legitimacy to begin with.
  - ithkuil 2y ago
    Post-creole I expect that a creole language will evolve over centuries into something that is less and less considered as a creole when compared with more recent creole languages. I think it's more useful to consider "creolization events" in the history of a language rather than a blanket "creole/non-creole" attribute
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    Do pseudocreoles include concreoles, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belter_Creole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belter_Creole ? Oye Hakalowda! Kowmang showxa lang belta hiya ke?
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! The definition of a "word" is always straightforward: a word is an atomic unit of language. However, which units are or aren't atomic varies according to what it is you're measuring. Lexically, "catch fire" is an atomic entity, which cannot be understood as the sum of its parts. It's just one part, and it needs its own dictionary entry, separate from "catch" and from "fire". Syntactically, "catch fire" is definitely not atomic, because the past tense is "caught fire". From this perspective, it's enough to know "catch" and "fire". Syntactically again, we can see that "an elephant" is in variation with "two elephants" / "my elephant" / "every elephant" / etc., and it's clear that "an elephant" is not atomic, but is understood as the composition of "a(n)" with "elephant". Phonologically, as the citation-form spelling above hinted, "an elephant" is atomic; the article cannot exist independently and must attach to another word. Without knowing what that word is, you won't know how the article is pronounced. Specialized terms for both of these types of phenomena exist - lexical words that are too large to be syntactic words are called idioms; syntactic words that are too small to be phonological words are called clitics. But the general lesson is that, despite the definition of "word" being clear, membership in the category varies according to what aspect of the language you're looking at.
  - barrucadu 2y ago
    By god you've done it, you've solved linguistics!
  - gvx 2y ago
    Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    This doesn't even begin to cover things, even for English. First of all, "catch fire" is at least partly understandable from its constituent parts - "catch" has a great variety of related meanings, and they all have to do with something taking hold of something else; I'm sure any English speaker who has encountered both words would intuit the meaning of "catch fire" without any problem, especially if they also encountered "to catch a cold". Of course, the meaning is slightly different, and it is quite invariant. Your analysis of the phonetic atomicity is also unsatisfactory. First, the article can very well be pronounced independently - I can say "English has a single indefinite article, with two forms: 'a' or 'an'". Secondly, the 'a' form can be pronounced in two different ways, depending on how you want to highlight it within a sentence: "he ate a piece" could use the schwa, or the "long a" if you want to highlight the article itself "he ate [ay] piece, not your piece". So the article's pronunciation can change independently of the word it is applying to. Finally, in at least some English accents, many words can be pronounced differently in certain sequences than others - for example, in modern Southern English, an "r" sound is introduced almost always in speech when a word that ends in a vowel sound is followed by another word that starts with a vowel sound, e.g. "I saw-R-it". By your description, neither "saw" nor "it" are individual word phonologically, since you don't know how they will be pronounced unless we know the following word. Overall, the atomicity of a linguistic construct is highly debatable, even in a particular context.
- nkrisc 2y ago
  My personal definition of “word” is “a unit of semantic meaning”. Don’t ask me to define that. Are numbers words? Are abbreviations words? Can a words contain other words? Can the same sentence have a different number of words when spoken versus written? Yes to all, and more.
  - RiverCrochet 2y ago
    Well, a good example is "ice cream" - I've seen it described as a "compound word without a hyphen" - which is fair because while ice cream has ice and cream as things that are used to make it, "ice cream" is definitely something distinct that is not trivially decomposable from the individual words. A good definition of "a unit of semantic meaning" might be "fulfills a 'part of speech' in a sentence" - but even that is hard in English. For example: "I set the table up" - up modifies set to create the "phrasal verb" set up, and isn't related to its typical meaning of position. But remove that little word and the whole meaning of the sentence drastically changes. I've seen "up" in this instance described as an adverb, which tends to be the "throwaway stat" for words that don't fit any of the other traditional parts of speech.
    - nkrisc 2y ago
      Those are all very good examples. Another I like is contractions. If say “can not” but it sounds like “can’t”, how many words is that? I might say that “not” does not have any semantic meaning in isolation, as its only use is to negate the meaning of some other word, so perhaps “can not” and “can’t” are both just one word. Perhaps such graphemes and phonemes aren’t actually words. Another interesting question is whether words are truly a product of language (the natural skill) or writing (the synthetic technology). Did “words” exist before writing?
  - mananaysiempre 2y ago
    > Are numbers words? Are abbreviations words? Not the interesting part, I think. Is the English un- a word? Before you reflexively say no, consider that it has a specific meaning even though it never appears on its own and never receives word stress. Is the French je a word? Before you reflexively say yes, consider that it never appears on its own and never receives word stress even though it has a specific meaning. Is the Latin que a word? (The Q in SPQR, “senatus populusque Romanus”, although perhaps it’d be more authentic to write “SENATVSPOPVLVSQVEROMANVS”.) It has a well-defined meaning: “and”. It goes after whatever word you’d put “and” before; not syntactic constituent, word. It counts as a part of that word for the purposes of stress, so POpulus but popuLUSque.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  I don't understand this comment. It makes absolutely no claims about the definition of a creole, and it makes no claims about how English doesn't conform to that definition. It just talks about "squinting" at languages, mentions black Americans for no particular reason, and accuses anyone who would argue that English is a creole of being "disingenuous" for trying to reverse the "legitimazation." It's like the perfect troll comment. Makes no argument, implies anyone who would disagree is probably racist, and uses black Americans as a comparison for no particular reason.* Here's my opinion: English is the result of a simplification of grammar caused by Old Norse and Old English crashing into each other with the same words but different grammar; then the French forced French usage in commerce, so most people started using a ton of French words with this English grammar. That last part sounds exactly like a creole. Is your argument that considering English a creole lets English people off the hook for something? Are things that happen to non-white people somehow delegitimized when they are also noted in white people? Are white people so special and unique that everything else has to be defined by it's non-whiteness? If I'm missing your point, what was it? [*] As a black American, I'm starting to recognize this as a long-standing feature of western rhetoric. A lot of modern argument seems to boil down to which side is more like black Americans. Humorously, actual black Americans are never considered to be like metaphorical black Americans; we're actually spoiled whiners with a sense of entitlement.
  - imbnwa 2y ago
    >Here's my opinion: English is the result of a simplification of grammar caused by Old Norse and Old English crashing into each other with the same words but different grammar; then the French forced French usage in commerce, so most people started using a ton of French words with this English grammar. That last part sounds exactly like a creole. Grandparent's point is that you're stretching the meaning of the term to a level of generality that applies to everything, therefore meaning nothing in particular. Your point applies to French just as much as English: Gaulic Celtic speakers poorly adopt Latin after getting bull rushed by Romans, then mix in Frankish terms when the Romans' former allies take over; or how about Sicilian: a mash-up of Latin, Greek, Germanic, Arabic conquerors. You have to go pretty far to find a language which isn't a fusion of other languages that results from different peoples entering into extended contact. 'Creole' is a word that only appears with its current meaning and history in the last 100 or so years, grandparent is simply preserving that particularity. Nothing more. No one in 1200s Europe thought English or Sicilian were languages not worth engaging with as actual languages owing to modern racial connotations.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  > It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages OK, but this is not a scientific definition. Nothing wrong with such words, but trying to logically reason about them is not going to be fruitful.
  - 39896880 2y ago
    The subject of the quote is Creolistics, not the definition of Creole. If you are looking for scientific definitions of linguistic categories you are going to be very disappointed. Language involves humans. Language is messy. As well, any question that involves “meaning” must itself answer the question “to whom?” I answered from the perspective of (some) linguists, but as another user pointed out, non-linguists might very well and with no ill intention consider it an appropriate term.
    - cryptonector 2y ago
      In Spanish 'criollo' is the word for 'creole', and its meaning has changed a fair bit from the French. It's more like "local", "ex-colonial", "dating all the way back to colonial times".
  - danans 2y ago
    > OK, but this is not a scientific definition. > Nothing wrong with such words, but trying to logically reason about them is not going to be fruitful Very few phenomena outside of physics have scientific definitions, yet we logically reason about them all the time, as we indeed must to make any sense of our world ethically, socially, and economically. Even making the physical human-built world around us relies a great deal on non-scientific definitions. The entire field of linguistics is based upon reasoning about and finding patterns on top of "non-scientific" definitions. As professor McWhorter (quoted in the article) has said in his lectures: "It's all just a puff of air".
- nicole_express 2y ago
  This is an interesting take; I've often seen the opposition to English as a creole trying to stress that English is a "real" language as opposed to the true creoles, which are as you say often treated as less legitimized. In that sense saying that English, the language of global communication and commerce, originated from a creole shows that that is a perfectly legitimate type of language and the same is true as other creoles. So to me it does more of a service than a disservice!
- empath75 2y ago
  It's not a very interesting concept if it's limited to one place and time. I think you can abstract a lot of the features of the languages originally classified as creoles and apply them where-ever they make sense. Personally I would say that Modern English is not a creole, and Old English is not a creole, but there was certainly a period of time in the early middle english period were England was invaded by the Norse and Normans that a lot of creole-like changes happened to the english language -- particularly the loss of grammatical gender and many declensions and conjugations and a simplification of grammar, and it happened for similar reasons -- an upper strata of society that spoke a different language being forced to communicate with the local people. And English at the time was definitely not considered an important language worth studying and people very rarely bothered even writing any books in English. I think it's worth thinking about the similarities and difference between what happened to english in the early middle english period, and other "true" creole languages beyond just saying it's not creole because it didn't happen in the 18th century.
teleforce 2y ago
Is English just badly pronounced French [video]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495393
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/spelling-reform.html https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/spelling-reform.h... If so it is equally badly spelled German.
  - xanderlewis 2y ago
    *spelt.
    - philshem 2y ago
      Nope. https://english.stackexchange.com/a/5714/ https://english.stackexchange.com/a/5714/
      - whatshisface 2y ago
        Long after the sword was smelt In foreign lands did wielder welt. The script upon the scabbard belt Thereupon became misspelt.
        73kl4453dz 2y ago
        A missing n?
      - xanderlewis 2y ago
        It was a lighthearted joke.
    - ndileas 2y ago
      personally I prefer wheat.
    - 2y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
The SMBC from a couple of days ago, sort of spoke to that: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/arthur https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/arthur
- talideon 2y ago
  That's the cartoon the Language Log post is commenting on. It's even included at the top of the entry.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    Yeah, I figured that (after the fact). I figured that it wouldn't be harmful to post it. I am deeply apologetic, if it caused trauma. That was not the intent. I read the headline on my iPad, just after I woke up. Just got back from my run, and I'll read the article after my shower. I figured some helpful soul would do an RTFA, if that was the case, and was not disappointed.
vonnik 2y ago
[flagged]
- azangru 2y ago
  > it has absorbed loan words from Romance languages Isn't a Creole defined by its simplified grammar rather than by the sources of its vocabulary?
  - esperent 2y ago
    No, that's a pidgin language. Creoles often develop out of pidgin languages but have full grammar and vocabularies.
  - talideon 2y ago
    No, it's neither. A creole is defined by its origins: it's a complete language that has developed out of a pidgin.
- nvader 2y ago
  Obfuscating what?
  - vonnik 2y ago
    That English is Germanic. A similar debate exists about how to categorize Yiddish, but for different reasons.
- talideon 2y ago
  I was with you right up to the last sentence. There is no "larger political program of obfuscation" here", just sloppy use of terminology.
- biorach 2y ago
  > English is in all ways a Germanic language Actually it's quite the outlier, due to its radically simplified verb system, loss of case and gender and large amounts of French vocabulary. There's no "political program of obfuscation", there's simply a debate on whether these features make English a creole.
wrp 2y ago
You can argue either way, because "creole" to too vaguely defined. The term was invented to cover a set of languages that had interesting historical and structural similarities, but it turns out to be hard to establish the boundaries of the set. I think it's unfair to the researchers to politicize it as some "post-colonial" writers have been doing.
sparsely 2y ago
There's a good comment on the blog: "This seems to me a rather feckless argument over how people want to define a term. Indisputably, modern English results from a blend of French and old English, in the process of which what we today call English absorbed a lot of French vocabulary, lost most of its inflection, and its verb conjugation was greatly simplified. Whether you want to call it a creole or not is pointless, what I just stated is still true."
- deleted 2y ago
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arder 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
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mise_en_place 2y ago
It's closer to Dutch or German. I had no issue understanding transit signage in Amsterdam. The difficult words are calques and idioms that don't directly translate, i.e. opponthoud. Exit is uitgang, literally an "outgoing". Entrance is ingang, ingoing.
- BtM909 2y ago
  opponthoud -> oponthoud Although, because I'm looking at it, I get semantic satiation.
- cml123 2y ago
  incidentally, outgang is technically a modern English word, but I've never heard it spoken in real life. You can see literary uses of its precessor "utgang" in Old English here [0] [0]https://bosworthtoller.com/search?q=utgang https://bosworthtoller.com/search?q=utgang
- indigo945 2y ago
  This is very much debatable. Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. [1] Some properties of English's grammar are also more similar to Romance languages than Germanic ones. For example, whereas Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis". I'm not saying English is a Romance language. But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why it's not considered a Romance language than you imply. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English
  - munificent 2y ago
    > Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or fraction of words in a typical utterance? Word usage is highly non-uniform, so you'll get very different ratios between the former and latter.
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RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
This quote by John Nicoll is very poignant: “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” ― James D. Nicoll
- ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
  I love that quote and the imagery it invokes. I think it's funny because it feels true - English speakers aren't precious about roping in new words from other languages. I enjoy the concept of the hybrid word - a word made from a mix of languages (e.g. neuroscience, Minneapolis, cryptocurrency etc). "Eigenvalue" is a good one as it's a mix of German and French.
gregors 2y ago
French + German
NickC25 2y ago
English is basically a dialect of German spoken with French words. The vast majority of our grammar rules come from German, whereas our vocabulary is a lot of French, however, mixed in with several hundred years of cultural integration due to the English-speaking world being hotbeds for immigration.
- advisedwang 2y ago
  A few major differences between english and german that I think make them more than just a lexical substitution: 1. Word order 2. Morphology (ie you combine morphemes to create words differently in english and german)
smoyer 2y ago
Funny ... I thought I was seeing Welsh but perhaps with too many vowels!
mikhailfranco 2y ago
We know that human populations have been mixing throughout history, including with species that no longer exist. We (Homo Sapiens) have genetic adaptations for speech, so it seems likely (but unproven AFAIK), that some Ur proto sound communication immediately fractured on migration, with isolated groups diverging rapidly, such that languages were not mutually comprehensible. Languages are cultural, so mutate much faster than genes. It seems unlikely that genetic adaptations for speech could evolve independently in different populations of our species. So my expectation is that all languages could be described as creoles, and only the length of isolation since last contact and exchange is in question. Some might call this purity, but it should not be called that, because it hitches a ride to genetic purity, and we know where that leads. Also pure does not mean best. It just means most unchanged, which often means less successful and more brittle. Creoles are antifragile. It is often the case that creoles are more useful (successful) than pure languages. Creoles occur at points of contact, trade, exchange, invasion, colonization, enslavement, expansion and diffusion. Development and populations tend to benefit in those situations, so creoles are probably more likely to be useful and survive. English is not the simplest language. It is certainly a mongrel, if not an academically verified creole. English does not have a standard. Famously, the first serious and comprehensive modern dictionary (OED) documented actual usage, not imagined correctness. By contrast, French, and most European languages, have a state-sponsored Academy to rule how the language should be used [1]. Central planning never works. English has evolved through many epochs of tribal conflict, invasion, conquest, colonization, trade, economic success, diasporas, intellectual influence, literature and modern media. Ironically, it is more of a lingua franca than French. Notice how English beautifully and flexibly adopts a foreign phrase for a foreign pidgin trade language, which did not include English :) Many distant historical languages only survived by fervent religious preservation, rather than practical usefulness. Vernaculars diverged, as expected. Latin and Sanskrit come to mind. Priests self-perpetuated their influence, by ensuring they were the only people educated in an obscure dead language, who could read and interpret holy books. A nice rent-seeking grift if you can keep it going for 2,000 years (Catholic church; 500 years earlier for Protestants). So the more interesting question does not involve the word creole, but instead asks: what are the current languages with the longest period of isolation? [1] Not coincidentally, the law is the same. English Common Law says you can do anything reasonable, until someone complains, then judges resolve the case, and it becomes a precedent in the common law. But the French have a top-down Napoleonic Code, which tries to describe everything that's forbidden. Needless to say, thanks to the war-mongering megalomaniac Little Corsican, most of Europe has the same legal framework (and also drive on the right, because of Napoleon+Hitler - a remarkable double-punch combination).
throw4847285 2y ago
It fascinates me how linguistics is completely enmeshed in human identity in a such a way that it is impossible to categorize languages without tackling some thorny questions. All the topics you aren't supposed to discuss in polite company (religion, political affiliation, and race) become unavoidable when trying to figure out the relationship of Serbian to Croatian, what is a creole vs. a pidgin, and the relationship of Yiddish and Ladino to medieval German and Spanish (respectively). Fun stuff.

108 points by aebtebeten 2y ago

Creole is both a sociohistoric and linguistic term. The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! As for whether English is a Creole, it’s important to understand the motivation for Creolistics at its origin. It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages that before were considered illegitimate, un-interesting and utterly lacking on features worth studying. Part of that reputation is inextricably bound up in colonialism and racism. Could you squint and call English a Creole? Sure. But you’d be doing the same disservice to “Creole” as you would by saying “technically we’re all [in the US] African American because all humans originated in Africa.” It’s a disingenuous point, and one that could easily be mistaken for trying to reverse the legitimization efforts that brought the term into existence to begin with.

Norah_C 2y ago
[flagged]
throwup238 2y ago
> we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! What's your best attempt? :-)
- flir 2y ago
  \s\w+\s ;)
  - eesmith 2y ago
    "Ain't ain't a word 'cause it don't match the regex." BTW, should be "\b\w+\b". The \b is a zero-width match for the start or end of a word. Your pattern requires a space before and after: >>> import re >>> re.compile(r"\b\w+\b").findall("What's the problem?") ['What', 's', 'the', 'problem'] >>> re.compile(r"\s\w+\s").findall("What's the problem?") [' the ']
    - flir 2y ago
      That makes sense. I was trying to translate "A word is a group of letters with whitespace on either side" into regex. I was being facetious, obviously, but you've already identified a serious problem with that definition (is "what's" two words or one?)
  - koito17 2y ago
    cljs.user> (re-seq #"\s\w+\s" "やり直して") nil Joking aside, is it common to use regular expressions? Seems like the method only works for languages with spaces. I think a more sophisticated lexer may be necessary, but are there are non-regex, "fast approximations" that work across most languages? This is a problem that I have not tried solving before.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      すみません! It's because you have no space around. A more correct regexp would be \b\w+\b, with zero-width "word boundary" psttetbs instead of spaces.
      - Liquid_Fire 2y ago
        That's just passing the problem onto how you define \b. Since Japanese uses no spaces, it would match entire phrases or sentences as "words", treating only punctuation as word boundaries.
- Xophmeister 2y ago
  It's a bit like the old saying, "All models are wrong, some models are useful." The concept of a "word" is useful in everyday language, particularly in English -- it's host language, unsurprisingly enough -- and (probably) other Indo-European languages. However, in a more precise context, it breaks down because of edge cases. For example, "words" in agglutinative languages[1] (e.g., Turkish) act very differently from "words" in English. It's hard (impossible?) to capture all that variety in a pithy way. "A string of morphemes" might work, but that's hardly a satisfactory definition! Maybe a good analogy for the HN crowd would be like asking, "How many characters are in a string?" [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language
  - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
    In Chinese, it's very difficult to define word boundaries. Each character is a syllable, with a particular pronunciation and a constellation of meanings, usually closely related to one another. There are very common combinations of characters that appear together, which one could define as words. However, often, you could just as easily view the individual characters as words, or the combination as a word. In some cases, the combination of two characters means something totally different from what the characters alone would mean (e.g., 东西, where the characters literally mean "East-West," but the combination means "thing"), so the combination is clearly a word. But sometimes, the meaning of the combination is basically a combination of the words' meanings (e.g., 吃饭, where the characters literally mean "eat-food," and the combination means "to eat, have a meal"). Because written Chinese doesn't use spaces, I guess it doesn't really matter what one defines as a word. The issue just doesn't come up, practically speaking.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      I should note that typically discussions of language are more fruitful around spoken (or signed) languages rather than writing. Writing is an artificial formal system, and as such sometimes has aspects which are much more socilogiclaly determined than spoken language, which tends to evolve more freely. Also, the problems you raise here are mostly just as applicable to English, though perhaps for somewhat fewer words. Is a "walkie-talkie" one word, or two? How about "unmarried"? The un- prefix has a distinct meaning on its own, even if it never appears alone, after all. Or how about "can't"? Technically it's a contraction of "can not", and those words do sometimes appear separately as well, even in this same meaning.
- throw__away7391 2y ago
  It depends on the architecture of your CPU.
- nivertech 2y ago
  There is no generally accepted definition in linguistics, but AI researchers have come to the consensus that a word is one or more LLM tokens ;) I’m not a linguist, but I would define a word as a part of a sentence composed out of one or more syllables, with word boundaries either implicitly or explicitly specified by different methods in different languages, e.g. by using pauses, longer or shorter phonemes, by using accents, rhythm, or intonation, or simply by remembering words as part of learning a lexical vocabulary. A word is something that can be categorized as to which part of speech it belongs (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.) Depending on the languages it’s not always clear whether prefixes and/or suffixes are part of the word a separate words. Similarly with compound words - do they count as a single or multiple words? A short sentence in one language may enter another language as a single opaque word.
ycombinete 2y ago
It's more about how people define the term. I don't think I've seen the position made disingenuously. Most people I've spoken to think of creole as a mixed language that becomes it's own language. To them that describes English and how it came to be. Even if you require colonisation to be part of it the position can stand. The Anglo-Saxon's colonisation by the Romans and the Normans are a big part of how the English mixture was formed. If your definition requires an indigenous, non-European, language being modified by contact with a European coloniser's language. Then sure, English isn't a creole language. But I don't think that's how most people use the term creole colloquially.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > The Anglo-Saxon's colonisation by the Romans That never happened; it was the other way around.
  - ithkuil 2y ago
    Germanic conquerors may be first partially reverse-colonized by the culture they conquered (which heavily romanized with Celtic substrate) and then later further colonized by norman conquerors who were themselves carriers of the remnants of the Roman cultural heritage. Germanic people (franks) conquered Gaul and you wouldn't call modern french a Germanic language. Linguistic dynamics are utterly fascinating and complex
    - ycombinete 2y ago
      I've been listening to The Rest is History podcast lately, and a lot of this happened in Islam via converts. Tom Holland was saying that many now fundamental Islamic practices were imported into the faith via converts. For example such as praying 5 times a day was apparently a Zoroastrian practice.
      - ithkuil 2y ago
        The same thing happened to many Cristian practices. The Eucharist may have originated in the cult of Dionysus. Probably also Christmas is also a tradition that bears the roots of a pre-christian festivity that has been merged with / subsumed in Christian tradition
k__ 2y ago
Why don't just define a new word? I mean you're linguists! :D Pseudo-Creole, a language that's technically a Creole, but doesn't fit the sociohistoic context. I think, it would be funny if a word for giving specific languages legitimacy is used to define a language that had more legitimacy to begin with.
- ithkuil 2y ago
  Post-creole I expect that a creole language will evolve over centuries into something that is less and less considered as a creole when compared with more recent creole languages. I think it's more useful to consider "creolization events" in the history of a language rather than a blanket "creole/non-creole" attribute
  - deleted 2y ago
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- 082349872349872 2y ago
  Do pseudocreoles include concreoles, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belter_Creole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belter_Creole ? Oye Hakalowda! Kowmang showxa lang belta hiya ke?
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! The definition of a "word" is always straightforward: a word is an atomic unit of language. However, which units are or aren't atomic varies according to what it is you're measuring. Lexically, "catch fire" is an atomic entity, which cannot be understood as the sum of its parts. It's just one part, and it needs its own dictionary entry, separate from "catch" and from "fire". Syntactically, "catch fire" is definitely not atomic, because the past tense is "caught fire". From this perspective, it's enough to know "catch" and "fire". Syntactically again, we can see that "an elephant" is in variation with "two elephants" / "my elephant" / "every elephant" / etc., and it's clear that "an elephant" is not atomic, but is understood as the composition of "a(n)" with "elephant". Phonologically, as the citation-form spelling above hinted, "an elephant" is atomic; the article cannot exist independently and must attach to another word. Without knowing what that word is, you won't know how the article is pronounced. Specialized terms for both of these types of phenomena exist - lexical words that are too large to be syntactic words are called idioms; syntactic words that are too small to be phonological words are called clitics. But the general lesson is that, despite the definition of "word" being clear, membership in the category varies according to what aspect of the language you're looking at.
- barrucadu 2y ago
  By god you've done it, you've solved linguistics!
- gvx 2y ago
  Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  This doesn't even begin to cover things, even for English. First of all, "catch fire" is at least partly understandable from its constituent parts - "catch" has a great variety of related meanings, and they all have to do with something taking hold of something else; I'm sure any English speaker who has encountered both words would intuit the meaning of "catch fire" without any problem, especially if they also encountered "to catch a cold". Of course, the meaning is slightly different, and it is quite invariant. Your analysis of the phonetic atomicity is also unsatisfactory. First, the article can very well be pronounced independently - I can say "English has a single indefinite article, with two forms: 'a' or 'an'". Secondly, the 'a' form can be pronounced in two different ways, depending on how you want to highlight it within a sentence: "he ate a piece" could use the schwa, or the "long a" if you want to highlight the article itself "he ate [ay] piece, not your piece". So the article's pronunciation can change independently of the word it is applying to. Finally, in at least some English accents, many words can be pronounced differently in certain sequences than others - for example, in modern Southern English, an "r" sound is introduced almost always in speech when a word that ends in a vowel sound is followed by another word that starts with a vowel sound, e.g. "I saw-R-it". By your description, neither "saw" nor "it" are individual word phonologically, since you don't know how they will be pronounced unless we know the following word. Overall, the atomicity of a linguistic construct is highly debatable, even in a particular context.
nkrisc 2y ago
My personal definition of “word” is “a unit of semantic meaning”. Don’t ask me to define that. Are numbers words? Are abbreviations words? Can a words contain other words? Can the same sentence have a different number of words when spoken versus written? Yes to all, and more.
- RiverCrochet 2y ago
  Well, a good example is "ice cream" - I've seen it described as a "compound word without a hyphen" - which is fair because while ice cream has ice and cream as things that are used to make it, "ice cream" is definitely something distinct that is not trivially decomposable from the individual words. A good definition of "a unit of semantic meaning" might be "fulfills a 'part of speech' in a sentence" - but even that is hard in English. For example: "I set the table up" - up modifies set to create the "phrasal verb" set up, and isn't related to its typical meaning of position. But remove that little word and the whole meaning of the sentence drastically changes. I've seen "up" in this instance described as an adverb, which tends to be the "throwaway stat" for words that don't fit any of the other traditional parts of speech.
  - nkrisc 2y ago
    Those are all very good examples. Another I like is contractions. If say “can not” but it sounds like “can’t”, how many words is that? I might say that “not” does not have any semantic meaning in isolation, as its only use is to negate the meaning of some other word, so perhaps “can not” and “can’t” are both just one word. Perhaps such graphemes and phonemes aren’t actually words. Another interesting question is whether words are truly a product of language (the natural skill) or writing (the synthetic technology). Did “words” exist before writing?
- mananaysiempre 2y ago
  > Are numbers words? Are abbreviations words? Not the interesting part, I think. Is the English un- a word? Before you reflexively say no, consider that it has a specific meaning even though it never appears on its own and never receives word stress. Is the French je a word? Before you reflexively say yes, consider that it never appears on its own and never receives word stress even though it has a specific meaning. Is the Latin que a word? (The Q in SPQR, “senatus populusque Romanus”, although perhaps it’d be more authentic to write “SENATVSPOPVLVSQVEROMANVS”.) It has a well-defined meaning: “and”. It goes after whatever word you’d put “and” before; not syntactic constituent, word. It counts as a part of that word for the purposes of stress, so POpulus but popuLUSque.
pessimizer 2y ago
I don't understand this comment. It makes absolutely no claims about the definition of a creole, and it makes no claims about how English doesn't conform to that definition. It just talks about "squinting" at languages, mentions black Americans for no particular reason, and accuses anyone who would argue that English is a creole of being "disingenuous" for trying to reverse the "legitimazation." It's like the perfect troll comment. Makes no argument, implies anyone who would disagree is probably racist, and uses black Americans as a comparison for no particular reason.* Here's my opinion: English is the result of a simplification of grammar caused by Old Norse and Old English crashing into each other with the same words but different grammar; then the French forced French usage in commerce, so most people started using a ton of French words with this English grammar. That last part sounds exactly like a creole. Is your argument that considering English a creole lets English people off the hook for something? Are things that happen to non-white people somehow delegitimized when they are also noted in white people? Are white people so special and unique that everything else has to be defined by it's non-whiteness? If I'm missing your point, what was it? [*] As a black American, I'm starting to recognize this as a long-standing feature of western rhetoric. A lot of modern argument seems to boil down to which side is more like black Americans. Humorously, actual black Americans are never considered to be like metaphorical black Americans; we're actually spoiled whiners with a sense of entitlement.
- imbnwa 2y ago
  >Here's my opinion: English is the result of a simplification of grammar caused by Old Norse and Old English crashing into each other with the same words but different grammar; then the French forced French usage in commerce, so most people started using a ton of French words with this English grammar. That last part sounds exactly like a creole. Grandparent's point is that you're stretching the meaning of the term to a level of generality that applies to everything, therefore meaning nothing in particular. Your point applies to French just as much as English: Gaulic Celtic speakers poorly adopt Latin after getting bull rushed by Romans, then mix in Frankish terms when the Romans' former allies take over; or how about Sicilian: a mash-up of Latin, Greek, Germanic, Arabic conquerors. You have to go pretty far to find a language which isn't a fusion of other languages that results from different peoples entering into extended contact. 'Creole' is a word that only appears with its current meaning and history in the last 100 or so years, grandparent is simply preserving that particularity. Nothing more. No one in 1200s Europe thought English or Sicilian were languages not worth engaging with as actual languages owing to modern racial connotations.
BurningFrog 2y ago
> It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages OK, but this is not a scientific definition. Nothing wrong with such words, but trying to logically reason about them is not going to be fruitful.
- 39896880 2y ago
  The subject of the quote is Creolistics, not the definition of Creole. If you are looking for scientific definitions of linguistic categories you are going to be very disappointed. Language involves humans. Language is messy. As well, any question that involves “meaning” must itself answer the question “to whom?” I answered from the perspective of (some) linguists, but as another user pointed out, non-linguists might very well and with no ill intention consider it an appropriate term.
  - cryptonector 2y ago
    In Spanish 'criollo' is the word for 'creole', and its meaning has changed a fair bit from the French. It's more like "local", "ex-colonial", "dating all the way back to colonial times".
- danans 2y ago
  > OK, but this is not a scientific definition. > Nothing wrong with such words, but trying to logically reason about them is not going to be fruitful Very few phenomena outside of physics have scientific definitions, yet we logically reason about them all the time, as we indeed must to make any sense of our world ethically, socially, and economically. Even making the physical human-built world around us relies a great deal on non-scientific definitions. The entire field of linguistics is based upon reasoning about and finding patterns on top of "non-scientific" definitions. As professor McWhorter (quoted in the article) has said in his lectures: "It's all just a puff of air".
nicole_express 2y ago
This is an interesting take; I've often seen the opposition to English as a creole trying to stress that English is a "real" language as opposed to the true creoles, which are as you say often treated as less legitimized. In that sense saying that English, the language of global communication and commerce, originated from a creole shows that that is a perfectly legitimate type of language and the same is true as other creoles. So to me it does more of a service than a disservice!
empath75 2y ago
It's not a very interesting concept if it's limited to one place and time. I think you can abstract a lot of the features of the languages originally classified as creoles and apply them where-ever they make sense. Personally I would say that Modern English is not a creole, and Old English is not a creole, but there was certainly a period of time in the early middle english period were England was invaded by the Norse and Normans that a lot of creole-like changes happened to the english language -- particularly the loss of grammatical gender and many declensions and conjugations and a simplification of grammar, and it happened for similar reasons -- an upper strata of society that spoke a different language being forced to communicate with the local people. And English at the time was definitely not considered an important language worth studying and people very rarely bothered even writing any books in English. I think it's worth thinking about the similarities and difference between what happened to english in the early middle english period, and other "true" creole languages beyond just saying it's not creole because it didn't happen in the 18th century.

teleforce 2y ago

Is English just badly pronounced French [video]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495393

bryanrasmussen 2y ago
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/spelling-reform.html https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/spelling-reform.h... If so it is equally badly spelled German.
- xanderlewis 2y ago
  *spelt.
  - philshem 2y ago
    Nope. https://english.stackexchange.com/a/5714/ https://english.stackexchange.com/a/5714/
    - whatshisface 2y ago
      Long after the sword was smelt In foreign lands did wielder welt. The script upon the scabbard belt Thereupon became misspelt.
      - 73kl4453dz 2y ago
        A missing n?
    - xanderlewis 2y ago
      It was a lighthearted joke.
  - ndileas 2y ago
    personally I prefer wheat.
  - 2y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

The SMBC from a couple of days ago, sort of spoke to that: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/arthur https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/arthur

talideon 2y ago
That's the cartoon the Language Log post is commenting on. It's even included at the top of the entry.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  Yeah, I figured that (after the fact). I figured that it wouldn't be harmful to post it. I am deeply apologetic, if it caused trauma. That was not the intent. I read the headline on my iPad, just after I woke up. Just got back from my run, and I'll read the article after my shower. I figured some helpful soul would do an RTFA, if that was the case, and was not disappointed.

vonnik 2y ago

[flagged]

azangru 2y ago
> it has absorbed loan words from Romance languages Isn't a Creole defined by its simplified grammar rather than by the sources of its vocabulary?
- esperent 2y ago
  No, that's a pidgin language. Creoles often develop out of pidgin languages but have full grammar and vocabularies.
- talideon 2y ago
  No, it's neither. A creole is defined by its origins: it's a complete language that has developed out of a pidgin.
nvader 2y ago
Obfuscating what?
- vonnik 2y ago
  That English is Germanic. A similar debate exists about how to categorize Yiddish, but for different reasons.
talideon 2y ago
I was with you right up to the last sentence. There is no "larger political program of obfuscation" here", just sloppy use of terminology.
biorach 2y ago
> English is in all ways a Germanic language Actually it's quite the outlier, due to its radically simplified verb system, loss of case and gender and large amounts of French vocabulary. There's no "political program of obfuscation", there's simply a debate on whether these features make English a creole.

wrp 2y ago

You can argue either way, because "creole" to too vaguely defined. The term was invented to cover a set of languages that had interesting historical and structural similarities, but it turns out to be hard to establish the boundaries of the set. I think it's unfair to the researchers to politicize it as some "post-colonial" writers have been doing.

sparsely 2y ago

There's a good comment on the blog: "This seems to me a rather feckless argument over how people want to define a term. Indisputably, modern English results from a blend of French and old English, in the process of which what we today call English absorbed a lot of French vocabulary, lost most of its inflection, and its verb conjugation was greatly simplified. Whether you want to call it a creole or not is pointless, what I just stated is still true."

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arder 2y ago

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mise_en_place 2y ago

It's closer to Dutch or German. I had no issue understanding transit signage in Amsterdam. The difficult words are calques and idioms that don't directly translate, i.e. opponthoud. Exit is uitgang, literally an "outgoing". Entrance is ingang, ingoing.

BtM909 2y ago
opponthoud -> oponthoud Although, because I'm looking at it, I get semantic satiation.
cml123 2y ago
incidentally, outgang is technically a modern English word, but I've never heard it spoken in real life. You can see literary uses of its precessor "utgang" in Old English here [0] [0]https://bosworthtoller.com/search?q=utgang https://bosworthtoller.com/search?q=utgang
indigo945 2y ago
This is very much debatable. Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. [1] Some properties of English's grammar are also more similar to Romance languages than Germanic ones. For example, whereas Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis". I'm not saying English is a Romance language. But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why it's not considered a Romance language than you imply. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English
- munificent 2y ago
  > Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or fraction of words in a typical utterance? Word usage is highly non-uniform, so you'll get very different ratios between the former and latter.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago

This quote by John Nicoll is very poignant: “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” ― James D. Nicoll

ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
I love that quote and the imagery it invokes. I think it's funny because it feels true - English speakers aren't precious about roping in new words from other languages. I enjoy the concept of the hybrid word - a word made from a mix of languages (e.g. neuroscience, Minneapolis, cryptocurrency etc). "Eigenvalue" is a good one as it's a mix of German and French.

gregors 2y ago

French + German

NickC25 2y ago

English is basically a dialect of German spoken with French words. The vast majority of our grammar rules come from German, whereas our vocabulary is a lot of French, however, mixed in with several hundred years of cultural integration due to the English-speaking world being hotbeds for immigration.

advisedwang 2y ago
A few major differences between english and german that I think make them more than just a lexical substitution: 1. Word order 2. Morphology (ie you combine morphemes to create words differently in english and german)

smoyer 2y ago

Funny ... I thought I was seeing Welsh but perhaps with too many vowels!

mikhailfranco 2y ago

We know that human populations have been mixing throughout history, including with species that no longer exist. We (Homo Sapiens) have genetic adaptations for speech, so it seems likely (but unproven AFAIK), that some Ur proto sound communication immediately fractured on migration, with isolated groups diverging rapidly, such that languages were not mutually comprehensible. Languages are cultural, so mutate much faster than genes. It seems unlikely that genetic adaptations for speech could evolve independently in different populations of our species. So my expectation is that all languages could be described as creoles, and only the length of isolation since last contact and exchange is in question. Some might call this purity, but it should not be called that, because it hitches a ride to genetic purity, and we know where that leads. Also pure does not mean best. It just means most unchanged, which often means less successful and more brittle. Creoles are antifragile. It is often the case that creoles are more useful (successful) than pure languages. Creoles occur at points of contact, trade, exchange, invasion, colonization, enslavement, expansion and diffusion. Development and populations tend to benefit in those situations, so creoles are probably more likely to be useful and survive. English is not the simplest language. It is certainly a mongrel, if not an academically verified creole. English does not have a standard. Famously, the first serious and comprehensive modern dictionary (OED) documented actual usage, not imagined correctness. By contrast, French, and most European languages, have a state-sponsored Academy to rule how the language should be used [1]. Central planning never works. English has evolved through many epochs of tribal conflict, invasion, conquest, colonization, trade, economic success, diasporas, intellectual influence, literature and modern media. Ironically, it is more of a lingua franca than French. Notice how English beautifully and flexibly adopts a foreign phrase for a foreign pidgin trade language, which did not include English :) Many distant historical languages only survived by fervent religious preservation, rather than practical usefulness. Vernaculars diverged, as expected. Latin and Sanskrit come to mind. Priests self-perpetuated their influence, by ensuring they were the only people educated in an obscure dead language, who could read and interpret holy books. A nice rent-seeking grift if you can keep it going for 2,000 years (Catholic church; 500 years earlier for Protestants). So the more interesting question does not involve the word creole, but instead asks: what are the current languages with the longest period of isolation? [1] Not coincidentally, the law is the same. English Common Law says you can do anything reasonable, until someone complains, then judges resolve the case, and it becomes a precedent in the common law. But the French have a top-down Napoleonic Code, which tries to describe everything that's forbidden. Needless to say, thanks to the war-mongering megalomaniac Little Corsican, most of Europe has the same legal framework (and also drive on the right, because of Napoleon+Hitler - a remarkable double-punch combination).

throw4847285 2y ago

It fascinates me how linguistics is completely enmeshed in human identity in a such a way that it is impossible to categorize languages without tackling some thorny questions. All the topics you aren't supposed to discuss in polite company (religion, political affiliation, and race) become unavoidable when trying to figure out the relationship of Serbian to Croatian, what is a creole vs. a pidgin, and the relationship of Yiddish and Ladino to medieval German and Spanish (respectively). Fun stuff.